The Massachusetts Audubon Society will be visiting the Lower Mills Branch Library of the Boston Public Library for a Container Gardening Class & Lecture. The address is 27 Richmond Street in Dorchester.
Participants are encouraged to bring their own containers, as supplies are limited. For more information call Elise at 617-298-7841.
The Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library’s free exhibition “More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape” looks at how environmental issues and social issues have been intertwined in the past, present, and future. See both historic and original maps and visualizations, including Olmsted plans for Boston, and learn more about struggles for environmental justice at the local and global levels. Features programs and events as well as opportunities for teachers, students, and families. Located at the main branch at 700 Boylston Street, explore the details at https://www.leventhalmap.org/digital-exhibitions/more-or-less-in-common/
Recently uncovered information about a relatively unknown story of mutiny and murder illustrating the centrality of smuggling and slavery in early American society with ties to the respected Old North Church of Paul Revere fame in Boston, will be discussed in an online talk sponsored by the Boston Public Library on November 10 at 6 pm, online . This presentation will be held on Zoom, and the link to attend will be sent to registrants the afternoon of the event. Register HERE.
Mutiny on the Rising Sun recounts the origins, events, and eventual fate of the Rising Sun’s final smuggling voyage in vivid detail. Starting from June 1743, it narrates a deeply human history of smuggling, providing an incredible story of those caught in the webs spun by illicit commerce. On the night of June 1, 1743, terror struck the schooner Rising Sun. After completing a routine smuggling voyage where the crew sold enslaved Africans in exchange for chocolate, sugar, and coffee in the Dutch colony of Suriname, the ship traveled eastward along the South American coast. Believing there was an opportunity to steal the lucrative cargo and make a new life for themselves, three sailors snuck below deck, murdered four people, and seized control of the vessel.
The case generated a rich documentary record that illuminates an international chocolate smuggling ring, the lives of the crew and mutineers, and the harrowing experience of the enslaved people trafficked by the Rising Sun. Smuggling stood at the center of the lives of everyone involved with the business of the schooner. Larger forces, such as imperial trade restrictions, created the conditions for smuggling, but individual actors, often driven by raw ambition and with little regard for the consequences of their actions, designed, refined, and perpetuated this illicit commerce.
Author Jared Ross Hardesty puts Old North Church under the spotlight as parishioners of the church who were formerly well-regarded and even helped pay for the famous steeple turn out to be involved in the slave trade. Captain Newark Jackson is the central figure, who was formerly honored with a chocolate shop in the North End named after him (2013–2019), but his name has now been removed from the store due to these revelations.
At once startling and captivating, Mutiny on the Rising Sun shows how illegal trade created demand for exotic products like chocolate, and how slavery and smuggling were integral to the development of American capitalism.
Jared Ross Hardesty is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Western Washington University and author of Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston and Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. For this program,Jared will be interviewed by Tessa Murphy, Assistant Professor of History at Syracuse University an expert on the history of the Caribbean and its connections to the greater Atlantic world.
For additional reading, we recommend the following articles:
The Garden Club of the Back Bay’s Annual Winter Tea will be held Thursday, January 23 from 3 – 5 at the Courtyard Restaurant of the Boston Public Library. Member price is $50, member guests $55. You may reserve online at https://bostonflora.com/shop/. Invitations will be sent electronically to Club members. The tea is a favorite time to socialize in the middle of winter, and we promise the food will be rich and traditional. Clotted cream, everyone?
Do you enjoy touring beautiful gardens? Take an armchair tour of the best public gardens in the Northeast to visit for inspiration! Learn about each garden’s highlights, ideal times to visit, and special features. The free lecture will take place at the Main Branch of the Boston Public Library on Thursday, May 30 from 2 – 3 pm.
Jana Milbocker is a garden designer, lecturer, garden writer and owner of Enchanted Gardens, a landscape design firm in Metrowest Boston. She published The Garden Tourist: 120 Destination Gardens and Nurseries in the Northeast in 2018. She has a passion for horticulture, and has been gardening on her 2-acre property in Holliston’s historic district for over 20 years.
Copley Square is one of Boston’s most architecturally significant and instantly recognizable public locations. This urban square is home to Trinity Church, the Boston Public Library, Old South Church and the Hancock Tower, among other important landmarks. The square defines the city, as well as the evolution of American architecture and urban design, from colony toward the sophistication of global European squares, moving creatively from Beaux-Arts style to International Style and Modernism. On March 27 at 6 pm in the First Floor Commonwealth Salon at the Boston Public Library, architectural historian Leslie Humm Cormier explores this contemporary place from its origins as an estuary to its vital significance as a stylistic link between old-world style and new-world design.
Leslie Humm Cormier, PhD, writes on the history and theory of art, architecture and urban design in Europe and America. She received her doctorate from Brown University as a Kress Fellow, affording her study in London and Paris. She is the author of a book on the Early Modern era in American architecture, as well as many articles on modern architecture and urban design in architectural encyclopedias. Previously a faculty member of Harvard University Extension and Radcliffe Seminars, Cormier is currently affiliated with the Boston Architectural College. For more information email ask@bpl.org
The 2019 Garden Club of the Back Bay Winter Tea will take place Tuesday, January 22 from 3 – 5 at The Courtyard Restaurant at the Boston Public Library at 700 Boylston Street. Garden Club member price $45, non-members $55. Names will be held at the door.
MLK Boston is a privately funded non-profit working closely with the City of Boston to create a new memorial and programs about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King and their time and work together in Boston. MLK Boston is now working on the creation of the memorial, to be located in the Boston Common. Public input is solicited, and renderings are on view now at the main branch of the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street until October 16, and at the Bolling Building in Dudley Square. WBUR has published a very good summary of the finalists at http://www.wbur.org/artery/2018/09/18/mlk-memorial-boston-common-artist-proposals. Vote at http://mlkboston.org/art/
Bring out your creative side in this soothing Boston Public Library flower arranging workshop for adults, to be held at the Parker Hill Branch, 1497 Tremont Street in Roxbury, on Wednesday, September 26 from 11 – 1:30. The workshop will last 2.5 hours; all materials will be provided. For more information visit http://bpl.bibliocommons.com/
Boston boasts some of the nation’s most recognizable and cherished green spaces, from Boston Common, to the Emerald Necklace, to hundreds of neighborhood parks, playgrounds, tot lots, community gardens, playing fields, cemeteries, and urban wilds. In this Boston Public Library exhibition, you will learn how the country’s oldest public park grew from a grazing pasture to an iconic recreational and social center, how 19th-century reformers came to view parks as environmental remedies for ill health, how innovative landscape architects fashioned green oases in the midst of a booming metropolis, and what the future holds for Boston’s open spaces. As you explore three centuries of open space in Boston, perhaps you will feel inspired to go outside and discover the green spaces in your own backyard. See the exhibit at the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the BPL’s Central Library in Copley Square through September 30. Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, 10 – 7, Friday & Saturday, 10 – 5, and Sunday, 1 – 5. For more information visit www.bpl.org.
